I agree with comments saying that this was an unusually unbalanced bit of reporting by the _Economist_, and with the argument that (whatever the eventual legal decisions) the fundamental problems lie with record companies' business models rather than with the service provided The Pirate Bay.

A few people have commented that Apple's iTunes provides a satisfactory service, and as someone who would like to download media for free I sympathise with their views. iTunes, however, does not support the open-source operating system Linux. Admittedly, Linux users comprise a relatively small market (perhaps 1-2% of the desktop market), but I'd have thought that's still a market worth tapping. Apple's reluctance to support them suggests a wider reluctance to adapt to free markets characteristic of the criticisms voiced in comments to this article against record companies.

Public libraries were there to share books among people without the need to purchase them. Not only they are not persecuted, they are actually funded with public money!
What is the fundamental difference between that noble aim and that of the Pirate Bay? I fail to see any.

> The founders of the Pirate Bay, the website, seemed to relish the court process, turning up to court in a bus daubed with slogans, *playing the part* of outsiders battling unjust authority and insisting that they were merely defending a popular technology rather than promoting illegality.

What the media industry doesn't get, though, is that they weren't just playing.

The handling of this issue has certain parallels with the handling of the financial crisis. It is clear that the people running the music/video business are not able to handle the new paradigm. Just like the bankers were not able to understand and handle the evolving financial paradigm.

Punishing these poor lads is like punishing the people who have set up the new internet private banking. It seems to be a result of pressure from vested interests rather than justice. Protecting those who are not competent to lead in an industry they no longer understand. Again, just like the banking system.
In both cases the consumer is suffering.

I accept searching for a torrent and downloading a torrent are not the same thing but the point I was making was that by using Google to search out torrent sites, there are plenty of other places apart from TPB to use to download music and films illegally.

The music and movie industries have a terrible track record of predicting harm to business or better products through new technology.
In the 20s the cinema musicians tried to stop the sound movies. Did composers and musicians stop earning money from movie music? Not quite.
The music industry did not allow their artists' songs to be played on radio in the 30s for fear of losing money. Did they lose money? Not quite.
The movie industry was firmly against the video cassettes and Universal sued Sony for Betamax. This was actually the solution to a crumbling Hollywood as it turned out. Did the movie industry lose money from video cassettes? Not quite.

The only thing the representatives of these industries achieve is to prove themselves true anti-market monopolists. As the fat cats they are they do not have the brains enough to see how money actually get back to them in a better way than before.
How come these billion dollar industries do not attract brain power? That is a million dollar question.

Courts must stop spend public money on cases like this. Music/movie industries must invest more money in protection of theirs properties, so people will not be able to download or record songs/music which are theirs property.

What a load of bollocks that these lads were convicted of essentially nothing and at the behest of aged companies. What the doddering media giants fail to comprehend is that the same amount of money is spent on music -- just differently. Track the decreased expenditure on CD sales and pay downloads and guess what .....it tracks exactly to a proportionate increase in concert ticket sales. That part of the business is booming. Troubadours are earning livelihoods the way they have since Homer. People budget as they have since time began. The notion that anyone is losing money is just BS. Moreover, if you are young and unknown, you get to be young and known if you can give your stuff away --- then charge for concert tickets. The economics here favor the artist and the consumer. Warner Bros. loss is Live Nation's gain: that is THEIR problem.

I concur with many of the comments here, the onus is upon the music companies to offer a viable alternative rather than closing every down every competitive outlet (something which will never happen). While this article acts as if Pirate Bay were the most trafficked torrent site, the fact of the matter is that there are quite a few which provide more links and more downloads. Even if THOSE were eliminated it still does not somehow rid the internet of the software that facilitates P2P, where one domain falls another one (or more) will surely arise because demand continues.

Black markets are an inefficient means of distribution, which arise when the market, for one reason or another, is failing to adequately distribute the product in question.

The media conglomerates, which formerly reaped the benefits of large economies of scale (market distortion #1) in the media markets, are not willing to adjust to the new technological realities of media distribution, as these new realities introduce a more perfect market, and hence reduced profits.

Intellectual property rights on media (distortion #2) prevents, or at least slows, the rise of new legal competitors in distribution. (Our intellectual property right law is outrageously opposed to the public good in the media sphere, by the way--we do not need 70 year copyrights on music to encourage musicians to continue innovating.) Thus the black market is able to play a role, despite obvious inefficiencies such as difficulty for consumers, increased danger to consumers, legal difficulties, etc.

Ironically, the only real motivation that these corporations now have to adjust their business model to meet new technological realities and to better serve their consumers, is the fear of being replaced by the black market! Thank you, Pirate Bay, for spurring the development of excellent media sites like Hulu.com, which *do* replace the need for a black market in online media.

Also, kudos for pendev for catching something I hadn't. Torrenting is NOT illegal nor should it be; there are tons of legitimate services that utilize torrent protocols for efficient distribution. In this case, it seems as though the Economist, though I love it, is the idiotic old man failing understand technology.

The real crime here is that contemporary media companies have utterly failed to adapt to consumers' demand for on-demand services. Look at the success of Hulu, which is now being trimmed by media companies demanding that they drop support for access software such as Boxee.

TPB should be hailed as heros for forcing change, not condemned by outdated copyright laws and idiotic old men who have failed to understand the technology and thus failed to effectively monetize and capitalize on a shifting paradigm.

The underlying theme of entities such as The Pirate Bay, is the fact that the Music (and movie) Industry conglomerates continue to stubbornly rely on a failed business model. The simple notion is that while online piracy is wrong, the restrictions put on those who purchase these goods legally get shafted through over-restrictive measures put on by the manufacturer (i.e. DRM, regional codecs, etc.). These continued policies cause many, including myself, to find alternative ways to make full use of my legally obtained purchases, such as copying a legally purchased movie to my iPod without spending 20 bucks extra on a DRM laden copy on iTunes. This effort has its opportunity costs, other methods of must be used. So while theft is wrong, I applaud the efforts of those involved in their attempts to change the status quo.

Interesting how in your article you make it 100% clear where you stand on the issue. Is it still journalism that you're trying to achieve? Or simply propaganda?

You wrote: "This was precisely because [the prosecutors] could not convince the judge that the site had a hand in directly distributing illegally copied material." However, a few paragraphs before that the following was stated: "Various embattled film and music companies, whose copyrighted wares the Pirate Bay helped to distribute, saw the process differently."

So, which one is it? Do you truly think that the fact the verb "to help" changes what you are implying? I love your newspaper, but I find articles such as this biased and overall annoying.

I have long respected the Economist because it provides well-reasoned commentaries on current issues. I would recommend you be more careful while throwing the word illegal around. To this moment, no one has proven that the torrent system in general is anyhow illegal.

The genuine breakthrough that the torrent technology introduced is spreading the illegal activity to all private users and eliminating any liability on the side of the host website, thus making it very cost-inefficient and difficult to prove illegal activity for those who believe their rights were infringed.

In an analogy to the current financial disturbances, torrents are much like CDOs. Risk is evenly spread out and for the ordinary spectator, technology has become an obstacle to understanding the nature of all the processes going on.

Therefore, blaming those who run the show is the same as putting all the responsibility for the financial mess to those who merely designed and implemented the derivatives instruments. On the other hand, chasing regular users by implementing laws is the same as accusing ordinary people for their own foreclosures.

In conclusion, chasing websites like the Pirate Bay or going after the end customer is a silly decision that negatively affects all players in the game. After all, if the media companies want their sales to increase, they better stop blaming technology and start looking for alternative marketing strategies.

This is just ridiculous! Any of the millions of torrent websites users will agree in saying that one less website won't affect at all their practice of downloading media for free on the internet.
They shut Napster down, then AudioGalaxy, Kazaa, Emule and now it's torrent time. Media companies should have learned by now that they're not gonna win this war. Instead of loosing time on trials they should be thinking on new ways to make profit in this business.